The Alabama special Senate Election is a bit of a rollercoaster. Republican Roy Moore held a real lead over Democrat Doug Jones for most of the race—until the Washington Post and other outlets published credible allegations that Moore had inappropriate sexual contact with teenagers while he was in his 30s. After those revelations, Moore’s poll numbers dropped and Jones’s shot up, allowing him to take the lead in the RealClearPolitics average.
But Moore might now be regaining ground.
The Republican leads in three polls taken after Thanksgiving. Both Change Research and JMC Analytics show a five-point lead for Moore, and Emerson College has him ahead by six. The RealClearPoltics average, which showed a Jones lead days ago, now has Moore up by two points.
While these three polls agree on where public opinion is, they disagree on some of the key dynamics in the race. For instance, the JMC poll and the Change Research survey both present an improvement for Moore (JMC previously had Jones up four and Change Research had Jones up by three), but the Emerson result represents a decline for Moore (they had him up by 10 after the Washington Post story broke).
But overall these surveys are a negative sign for Jones. Candidates almost always prefer to be ahead in the polls, and Moore’s ability to regain some voters who had soured on him post-allegations should worry his opponent. Alabama is a deeply Republican state, so any move toward even slightly more normal voting patterns represents a problem for the Democrat.
It’s also worth noting that these polls, like all surveys, are snapshots in time. There’s still time for either Moore or Jones to increase his standing. These polls may be a sign that Alabama’s Republican partisanship is kicking in to give Moore an advantage. Or maybe an unforeseen event (like the Washington Post story) will shake up the race again. There are many possible futures, and polls simply can’t tell us which one lies ahead of us.
But maybe most importantly, polls in this race rely on different projections about the shape of the electorate in this special election. There’s not a lot of historical precedent for special Senate races in Alabama while an unpopular Republican is president and the GOP candidate has been accused of a sexual impropriety with minors. So different pollsters will make different projections about the contours of the electorate, and we won’t know which one is right until the votes are counted in December.
